Fans share personal tributes to Alice Munro

Casual, salon-style event pays homage to Nobel Prize winning author

Canadian author Alice Munro. Vancouver Writers Fest creative director Hal Wake will share three stories about his personal experiences with Munro at the tribute event.

Photograph by: CHRIS YOUNG
, THE CANADIAN PRESS

Munro’s Books: A Celebration of Alice’s Nobel Prize

Thursday, 7 p.m.| Tangent Cafe, Commercial Drive

Tickets: Free

A tribute for Alice Munro to mark her Nobel Prize win is being held in Vancouver on Thursday night.

The 82-year-old author was awarded the prize in October, but was unable to travel to accept the prize in person this week in Sweden. Munro lived in Victoria in the 1960s and founded Munro’s books with her now-ex-husband 50 years ago.

Hal Wake, the Vancouver Writers Fest’s creative director, plans to be there and says he will share three stories about his personal experiences with Munro.

“I see this really as just a chance for members of the community to honour and celebrate her,” Wake said.

Wake said he appreciated some of Munro’s comments when she won the prize, particularly her hope to re-invigorate an appreciation of the short story as a form of literature, and that she hoped people around the world would discover Canadian literature.

“Let’s think of Munro as a gateway drug (to Canadian literature),” Wake said. “If somebody reads Alice and — because she does write so directly and clearly about Canada — that leads somebody to look for more Canadian writers who tell different stories about this place, then that’s a fabulous outcome.”

The event will be in a very casual, salon-style event where people come together to eat, drink and discuss Munro, said Marsha Lederman, one of the event’s organizers and the Globe and Mail’s Western arts correspondent.

“Everyone was excited about this. It was such an explosion of joy,” Lederman said. “I burst into tears when I read that she had won the Nobel Prize because she’s accessible. It doesn’t mean that what she does is not incredible, but she’s someone that so many of us read.”

Munro’s latest book is Dear Life, a short story collection. She has won three Governor General’s Literary Awards, two Scotiabank Giller Prizes, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Man Booker International Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Marian Engel Award.

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